BREAKING NEWS: Design

20 Fire Pit Design Ideas for 2026 Smart Homeowners Use to Anchor Their Backyard Layout

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 06:44:17 +0000

Fire pits have quietly shifted from being decorative add-ons to becoming the organizing center of outdoor spaces. The best designs don’t just add warmth—they define where people gather, how long they stay, and how a backyard feels after sunset. From sunken seating and architectural concrete to simple fire bowls set into lush planting, today’s fire pit designs are less about spectacle and more about intention.

The fire pits that work best aren’t always the most dramatic. They’re the ones positioned at the right height, surrounded by seating that feels intuitive, and woven into the landscape instead of sitting apart from it. These examples show how fire can quietly organize an outdoor space, soften hard materials, and make a backyard feel inviting long after the sun goes down.

Table of Contents

Fire Pit Carved Into the Hillside With Open Ocean Views

@heliotropearchitects

This octagonal fire pit is carved directly into the hillside, allowing the ocean view to remain completely open from the house. By lowering the concrete frame below grade, the design keeps the horizon uninterrupted while still creating a defined gathering space. The fire feels integrated into the terrain rather than placed on top of it.

The built-in wood seating follows the geometry of the pit, reinforcing the shape and anchoring the space. Nothing here competes with the landscape. The materials stay simple, the lines stay clean, and the view remains the focal point even after sunset.

Sunken Fire Pit That Feels Carved Into the Backyard

@pacificstonedesign

I’m drawn to sunken fire pits like this because they immediately create a sense of place. By lowering the seating area, the fire becomes part of the architecture rather than an object placed on top of the patio. The clean concrete edges keep it modern, while the overhead string lights soften the geometry and visually pull the pool, seating, and fire into one evening-ready composition. This is the kind of design that works just as well when no one is using it.

Fire Bowl That Makes Conversation the Focus

@living_at_lightfoots

This is one of my favorite ways to use a fire pit: simple, centered, and intentional. The low steel bowl doesn’t compete with the furniture; it grounds it. I like how the gravel base defines the zone without hard edges, letting the chairs feel relaxed rather than staged. It’s the kind of setup where people naturally lean in, pull their chairs closer, and stay longer than planned.

Traditional Stone Fire Pit Built for Gatherings

@edyinethmelgarejo

This design works because it respects how people actually sit and talk around fire. The circular layout keeps everyone equally connected to the flame and to each other. As a landscape designer, I appreciate the subtle contrast between the light gravel field and the darker stone pit—it defines the area clearly without fencing it in. It’s classic, but not dated, because the proportions are right.

Modern Fire Pit Framed by Architecture

@sticksandstonesoutdoor

What stands out here is how the fire pit is framed by structure. The pergola creates a ceiling, the built-in bench defines the perimeter, and the fire sits perfectly centered within that geometry. I like using fire this way when a backyard needs order. It turns an open space into an outdoor room, especially effective when the surrounding planting is kept clean and intentional.

Lounge-Style Fire Pit That Encourages Long Evenings

@kamomarsh

This sunken seating area feels designed for lingering. The deep cushions, low fire bowl, and layered stone steps create a gradual transition into the space, which is something I always aim for in residential landscapes. The fire is calm, not dramatic, and that’s intentional. It supports conversation instead of dominating it.

Sculptural Fire Bowl Set Into a Soft Landscape

@brookeandbrice

This fire pit works because it’s restrained. The curved concrete seating feels carved rather than constructed, and the fire bowl sits quietly at the center without demanding attention. I often design spaces like this when the surrounding landscape is meant to shine. The fire becomes part of the garden experience, not a distraction from it.

Compact Fire Pit That Maximizes a Small Patio

@designbybrookside

What I appreciate here is efficiency. The built-in seating defines the fire pit zone without wasting space, and the raised edges double as informal seating. This is a smart solution for smaller yards where every square meter matters. The materials are simple, but the layout does the heavy lifting.

Fire Pit That Visually Connects to the Pool Area

@homesweetnash

Fire and water work best when they’re visually aligned, and this design gets that right. The linear seating pulls your eye toward the fire, while the pool reflects light back into the space at night. I like how the fire pit is slightly offset rather than centered—it feels intentional and avoids symmetry fatigue.

Integrated Into a Curved Garden Layout

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10 Bathrooms That Changed How I Think About Renovating Mine

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 18:00:33 +0000

Not every bathroom is worth copying. Some look good in photos and fall apart in daily use. Others solve real problems and keep working long after the novelty wears off.

The bathrooms below fall into the second category. These are the spaces I would use as reference points if I were renovating today.

1. The Backlit Mirror That Replaces Overhead Light

This bathroom changed how I think about task lighting. The mirror becomes the light source, which removes glare from above and keeps the ceiling calm. Nothing competes with the sink zone.

What I would steal here is restraint. One mirror. One glow. No extra fixtures trying to help. It feels quieter, and the room reads larger because the light floats instead of drops.

2. The Framed Mirror That Carries the Wall

This mirror does more than reflect. Its edge thickness gives the wall structure, almost like trim. The sconces stay secondary, not decorative.

I would keep this approach when the vanity runs long. One strong mirror anchors the wall and removes the need for visual clutter across the surface.

3. The Wood Tub That Turns a Fixture Into Furniture

This is not about luxury. It is about material contrast. The wood softens the scale of the tub and makes it feel placed, not installed.

I would use this idea when the bathroom opens into a bedroom or dressing zone. The tub becomes part of the room, not a separate utility object.

4. The Vertical Shower That Respects Floor Space

This layout proves that height matters more than footprint. The vertical shower line draws the eye up and frees the floor.

I would apply this in smaller bathrooms where the instinct is to widen everything. Going taller keeps circulation clean and avoids visual crowding.

5. The Open Vanity That Accepts Exposure

This sink does not hide plumbing. It accepts it. That choice removes bulk and keeps the wall breathable.

I would use this where storage can move elsewhere. The gain in light and openness outweighs closed drawers in tight rooms.

6. The Bathroom That Borrows From the Window

This space works because it shares light with the room beyond. The mirror reflects greenery, not tile.

I would always look for this option now. Borrowed views make bathrooms feel less sealed and less mechanical.

7. The Color Block Wall That Defines Zones

This wall does the zoning work without partitions. Color replaces walls. The mirror stays centered and calm.

I would use this when a bathroom needs structure but not division. It guides use without closing space.

8. The Soaking Tub That Acts as the Room Anchor

Here, the tub sets the layout, not the vanity. Everything responds to it.

I would plan this first in a renovation where bathing matters. Once the tub sits right, the rest becomes easier to resolve.

9. The Lounge Element That Changes Behavior

A chair does not belong in most bathrooms. Here, it does. It signals pause, not rush.

I would only use this when space allows, but the idea matters. Bathrooms should support rest, not only routines.

10. The Bedroom-Bath Hybrid That Removes Barriers

This is not about openness. It is about continuity. Materials flow, and the tub feels expected.

I would not copy this directly, but I would borrow the mindset. When a bathroom connects to sleep, softness matters more than separation.

The post 10 Bathrooms That Changed How I Think About Renovating Mine appeared first on Homedit.

The Clever Way to Turn Your Home into a Curated Art Gallery

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 17:20:34 +0000

Swapping wall art is a great way to refresh a space with your style, but it doesn’t have to involve hammering more holes into the wall, moving pieces around, or shopping for something new. In fact, it can be as easy as changing the channel.LG Gallery+ is a new visual curation service for LG TVs — and a brilliant way to make your home more unique and personalized. READ MORE...

Why is Elon Musk really going to the moon?

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 17:00:00 +0000

After 25 years of obsessing over Mars, Elon Musk announced that SpaceX has shifted focus from invading the Red Planet to invading the moon. He claims he will build a self-sustainable lunar metropolis in less than a decade—a sharp contrast to his proposed Mars colony, which he says would now take at least 20 years. Both timelines are as fictional as Star Trek, but at least now his plan makes sense.

It is a jarring plot twist from January 2025, when Musk dismissed the moon as a “distraction.” Now, he says, the natural satellite is the “overriding priority” to secure civilization. Musk argues a lunar base is necessary because a “natural or man-made catastrophe” on Earth could cut off the supply lines a Mars colony would need to survive.

Musk might actually be making sense this time. As Harvard physicist Avi Loeb points out, Musk is right to pivot. The moon is closer, making it faster to get to, and it aligns with the geopolitical objectives of the United States (the government pays a lot of SpaceX’s bills). It makes sense financially, opening the opportunity for the return on investment that may come from mining the lunar surface and orbiting asteroids, as well as his absurd plan to put 1 million AI satellites in orbit (made and launched from the moon, no less).

The financial aspect is the key. Really, it’s the whole endgame. By choosing a target that’s more accessible—and lucrative—than Mars, Musk is crafting a realistic illusion for investors and bull analysts. He needs to inflate the immediate financial expectations of SpaceX so that his company can get as much money as possible in its programmed 2026 IPO.

Hard limits

The unavoidable fact that forced him to pivot from Mars is, above everything, basic physical limitations. “[The moon] is much more practical to bring people back and forth,” Loeb told NewsNation. Musk described his “self-growing city” on X as a settlement that would be capable of expanding rapidly, using local resources. It’s not something that has ever been demonstrated. Still, Loeb argues that “the moon makes much more sense” before we attempt to leap into the deep void of the solar system.

The physics of space travel do not care about Musk’s marketing tweets. The moon is simply a more forgiving target. Musk says that SpaceX can launch to the moon every 10 days, allowing for rapid iteration; whereas Mars missions are shackled to planetary alignments that only occur every 26 months.

[Rendering: SpaceX]

The commute is also drastically different: a two-day hop versus a six-month deep-space haul involving exposure to radiation and all sorts of space dangers. As Quentin Parker, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Hong Kong, points out: “If you have some issue or emergency, you’re a few days away from Earth. You’re months away if you’re on Mars.” That’s the difference between a rescue mission and a lot of funerals.

Whenever it is ready, the SpaceX Starship’s massive capacity to haul over 110 tons of cargo makes it a powerful workhorse to send everything Musk needs to build his fabled city as fast as possible.

Moon Base Alpha and lava tubes

Musk is calling his proposed self-sustaining lunar city “Moon Base Alpha,” a direct homage to the 1970s British-Italian sci-fi television series Space: 1999. In the show, Moonbase Alpha is a high-tech scientific research center located in the lunar crater Plato.

Musk’s lunar city’s hardware is radically different from the TV series’ shiny sets and spaceships. The workhorse for his plan is the Starship Human Landing System (HLS), a modified version of the regular Starship that’s stripped of its heat shield and flight flaps because it will never need to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere. Instead of massive engines at the base, this ship uses smaller hull-mounted thrusters for touchdown to avoid blasting a crater into the landing zone and kicking up lethal dust.

[Rendering: SpaceX]

Once landed, a massive elevator would lower crews and cargo from the high-altitude cabin. The sheer volume of a Starship offers nearly 35,000 cubic feet of pressurized space—dwarfing the Apollo Lunar Module’s cramped 160 cubic feet—which allows for actual living quarters rather than just survival pods. SpaceX also envisions landing and tipping Starships horizontally and burying them under 5 meters of regolith to shield crews from cosmic radiation.

Powering this buried city requires overcoming the lunar night, which lasts for two weeks of freezing darkness. For that, SpaceX will need nuclear reactors like those designed by Kilopower researchers—10-kilowatt fission units that can run continuously for a decade, rather than relying solely on solar power. The city will still need solar arrays, especially in the initial phase. NASA and SpaceX are developing Vertical Solar Array Technology (VSAT)—32-foot-tall masts designed to capture sunlight that grazes the horizon at the lunar South Pole.

To move around, astronauts won’t just be walking; they’ll live inside pressurized rovers—essentially, mobile habitats that allow them to explore for weeks without returning to base.

But the ultimate goal is to go underground. Musk’s engineers are exploring another old idea for lunar bases: lava tubes. These massive natural tunnels were formed millions of years ago by ancient lunar volcanic flows. They offer ready-made protection with stable temperatures of around 63 degrees. Inside these subterranean cathedrals, SpaceX can build habitats using regolith-based 3D printing tech, like those imagined by 3D-printing construction companies Luyten and Icon. Giant rovers can also weave fibers from moon dust to construct inflatable module supports inside the lava tubes.

[Rendering: Icon]

However, the chasm between rendering and reality remains vast. SpaceX targets a 2026 orbital refueling test for Starship—a critical prerequisite for any lunar mission—a date that has been pushed repeatedly and doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. Aside from part of its elevator, the company hasn’t delivered most of the hardware for Starship HLS. It’s all on the drawing board, which is why NASA reopened the bids for the lunar lander in 2025 after SpaceX failed to progress on their promised milestones.

Icon’s lunar construction system is still in R&D, and the Kilopower nuclear reactors, while promising, are still in the ground-testing phase, with deployment unlikely before the 2030s. Musk’s “less than a decade” timeline assumes a flawless convergence of technologies that, right now, exist mostly on paper.

Follow the money

But we know Musk’s pivot isn’t about practicality. It’s about business and valuation.

On February 2, SpaceX merged with Musk’s artificial intelligence venture, xAI, creating a corporate titan valued at $1.25 trillion. Sources indicate SpaceX is preparing for a mid-June 2026 IPO that could target a valuation as high as $1.5 trillion, potentially the largest listing in history. Investors love many fast catalysts, not multi-decade pipe dreams.

Musk wants to dominate AI, and he knows he needs raw power. So, he plans to build orbital data centers to feed this AI obsession, allegedly bypassing the power and cooling constraints of terrestrial facilities.

Musk’s narrative is selling the idea that the only way to put a million xAI servers in orbit is to exploit the moon’s resources. Mine it for silicon and oxygen. Build the factories to make the servers. Build a magnetic cannon system to launch the servers into Earth’s orbit. The moon becomes the construction site for the “vertically integrated innovation engine,” he promised during the xAI merger announcement.

Musk appears to believe he can build this infrastructure before his life ends. It doesn’t matter that multiple experts think that’s impossible. It doesn’t matter that he’s basically proposing building a potential weapon of mass destruction—a cannon satellite launcher—on the moon. It doesn’t matter that he wants to put a million-satellite orbital minefield around Earth. And it doesn’t matter that thermodynamics makes it extremely difficult for his idea of cooling xAI servers in space to become a reality.

[Rendering: SpaceX]

Space is not “the cheapest place to put AI in 36 months or less,”as Musk has said. In fact, according to Lluc Palerm, satellite research director at the consulting firm Analysys Mason, Musk’s plan to make money out of space servers has the same magnitude of challenge as a Mars mission.

Still, building a lunar city aligns perfectly with NASA’s Artemis program—which recently saw the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket lift off for the first time in 50 years—and offers immediate revenue potential through government contracts that a distant Mars colony simply cannot match.

The Bezos threat

Which brings us to the second player in this moon race. Musk is suddenly battling a competent Jeff Bezos. For years, SpaceX’s factory in Texas stood unrivaled. But Blue Origin has finally started delivering. It’s landing its New Glenn rocket and developing a Blue Moon Mark 1.5 lander that doesn’t require complex orbital refueling. That’s competition to Musk in terms of actual Earth dollars.

“Multiple sources have told Ars that Bezos has told his team to go ‘all in’ on lunar exploration,” writes Ars Technica’s space editor Eric Berger. This creates a genuine threat that Blue Origin could put humans on the lunar surface before Starship gets there.

Bezos isn’t just playing catch-up either. He is building a parallel industrial machine. Blue Origin has successfully tested Blue Alchemist, a technology that melts lunar regolith to autonomously manufacture solar cells and transmission wire without needing any materials from Earth. The company has also launched Project Oasis, a mission to map lunar water ice and helium-3 by using low-orbit satellites equipped with neutron spectrometers. To cut costs, Blue Origin is developing Project Jarvis, a reusable stainless-steel upper stage for the New Glenn rocket, mirroring the reusability of Starship.

Bezos’s vision is not to build underground cities on the moon but to build O’Neill colonies, which are massive orbiting habitats. He sees the moon not as a colony, but as the mine that will build them (again, a crazy long-term plan).

So Musk’s pivot appears to be a calculated move to seize the commercial opportunity of the moon before his rival does.

Red Moon rises

While Musk tweets about future cities and Bezos powers up, the most dangerous enemy for the United States’ space hegemony is on a fast collision course. China is the last part of Musk’s wild turn.

The Asian giant is executing a concrete, century-long road map. On January 29, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) officially launched the Tiangong Kaiwu program—a massive national plan named after a 1637 Ming Dynasty scientist’s encyclopedia—to extend Chinese industrial dominance across the solar system. The plan treats space not as a scientific frontier, but as an economic zone.

According to academic Wang Wei, the architect of the proposal, the goal is to secure strategic minerals from near-Earth objects to fuel Earth’s sustainable development. The regime reports: “Among the 1.3 million asteroids in our solar system . . . about 700 are relatively close to Earth and estimated to be worth over $100 trillion U.S. dollars each. Taking technical feasibility and cost-effectiveness into consideration, 122 of them are economically suitable for mining and use.”

This is a four-stage industrial conquest. CASC’s road map dictates that by 2035, China will establish a lunar resource development system and begin mining near-Earth asteroids. By 2050, operations will expand to Mars and the main asteroid belt. The timeline extends to 2075 for the exploitation of Jupiter and Saturn, aiming for a fully operational solar-system-wide resource network by 2100. Unlike Musk’s private ventures, this is state policy: Verify feasibility by 2030, build the supply chain by 2035, and dominate the market by mid-century.

China has already poured concrete for this launchpad. They have successfully deployed the Queqiao satellite constellation—including the recently launched Queqiao-2—creating the world’s first permanent communication relay for the lunar far side. This network is the backbone for future autonomous mining operations.

Furthermore, the plan includes a gigawatt-class space-based digital infrastructure that integrates cloud computing and space debris monitoring, essentially creating a space traffic control system that China intends to manage. While Musk is pivoting his company to catch up, Beijing’s machine has been methodically laying the tracks for decades. And it has a plan to catch up and surpass the U.S.

While Musk may want us to believe that only he has the key to our future and that his new moon plan is what we all need, there are clearly other people on the planet who think otherwise. For now, what we really have is yet another erratic plot twist, a radical course change masquerading as “The New Way to Save Humanity”—while he makes lots of money in the process.

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This MIT grad built an AI tool to show how hard Olympic figure skating actually is

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 16:30:00 +0000

Part of a figure skater’s job is to make their routine look as effortless and graceful as possible, as if they’re floating on ice and soaring into the air through sheer force of will. In reality, they’re often launching themselves multiple feet into the air with what amounts to sand bags on their feet; generating hundreds of pounds of centripetal force through rotations; and landing on a blade that’s just 3/16 of an inch wide.

At the 2026 Winter Games in Milan and Cortina, Italy, NBC is using an AI tool developed by a former MIT researcher to help audiences understand just how mind-boggling the feats of today’s Olympic athletes are.

Jerry Lu [Photo: Bryce Vickmark/MIT]

Jerry Lu is a 2024 MIT graduate and the founder of OOFSports, a sports analytics company that uses AI to analyze program footage, document performance data in real time, and allow commentators to give viewers a more concrete understanding of athletes’ feats. At Milan Cortina, he’s partnering with NBC Sports on its figure skating, snowboarding, and skiing programming, collecting data like the height of jumps, athletes’ speed, and their rotational paths.

As figure skaters continue to break new ground in the sport—like landing more and more jumps with quadruple rotations (see American skater Ilia Malinin’s first-ever quad axel landed at the Olympics), Lu’s AI-powered tech can help make sense of their routines, moment by moment.

[Video: Jerry Lu]

A big ask from NBC

Lu’s career in sports analytics began with his own interest in competitive swimming. During his undergraduate studies at the University of Virginia, he worked with the mathematician Ken Ono to develop a wearable device that let the school’s swimmers analyze their strokes, which helped them to increase propulsion and reduce drag. Lu later served as a technical consultant for five swimmers who won medals at the Tokyo Olympics in 2020, followed by 16 medalists at the Paris Olympics in 2024.

During his time at MIT in its dedicated sports lab, Lu began experimenting with sports analytics technology for other fields, including a program designed to help Australia’s BMX freestyle team optimize its strategy. Following the Paris Olympics, he says, NBC approached him directly to ask if he could create a data analytics system for figure skating in Milan Cortina.

“At that point, some of the artistic sports were missing this data-driven storytelling ability—if you watch hockey on TV, it looks slow, but if you watch it in person, it looks fast,” Lu says. Similarly, he explains, if one were to watch American figure skater Amber Glenn perform a jump on screen, it might not look mind-blowing—but in person, she would be soaring unbelievably high in the air. NBC needed a way to bridge the gap between those two experiences.

Building an AI model for the Olympics

For Lu and his team—none of whom are skaters—the first step toward building this tool was jumping on a call with former Olympic skaters and longtime NBC analysts Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir. Unlike sports like swimming or track and field, the judging parameters for figure skating can involve quite a bit of grey area, meaning that Lu’s team needed a full run-down of what the judges would be looking for.

“They essentially taught us the sport,” Lu says. “They taught us exactly what they were looking for, what the judges are looking for, what, from their understanding, is a virtue, and what’s a vice. We needed to come up with ways to quantify those and essentially give them the metrics with which they can compare across athletes.”

Making a tool for analyzing figure skating required a completely different system from swimming, Lu says. Whereas propulsion and drag were the two main variables in that sport, figure skating is all about the speed and rotation needed to complete complicated jumps. To calculate those metrics without wearables, his team trained an AI model to analyze program footage and identify a variety of rotational points on the athlete’s body, from their head to shoulders, elbows, hips, and ankles.

Using those data points, the team then taught the model to categorize different jumps based on body positioning—like the toe loop, luxe, and axel—and, further, to count the athlete’s total rotations in order to classify the jumps as a double, triple, or quad. By understanding exactly where the skater is at any given point, the AI model can calculate statistics like their speed when entering a jump, total jump height, jump exit speed, and the ground they cover across the rink; all crucial elements of their performance. These kinds of numbers can help commentators like Lipinsky and Weir paint a much more detailed picture for this year’s Olympic viewers.

Will AI ever replace Olympic figure skating judges? This researcher says no

Outside of his collaboration with NBC, Lu has turned his figure skating model into an app called OOFSkate, which lets skaters of any level film their routines and instantly understand their own stats. The app became an official partner of U.S. Figure Skating in December 2025.

Lu’s next step is creating a version of this technology that not only tracks skaters’ routines, but also scores them. Right now, he already has a model in the works, which he plans on debuting some time during the skating off-season. Ultimately, he says, the model will be able to assist in evaluating technical performance on a select number of skills, but it will never replace human judgements on athletes’ artistic performance.

“Figure skating is this very unique blend of artistic and technical abilities,” Lu says. “The Olympics is all about athletes going higher, faster, stronger—otherwise you don’t deserve to be here. Figure skating has a part of that, which is that the bigger jumps get awarded bigger points, which is correct—if you did a quad and I did a triple, you should get more points. But at the same time, this artistic element is also part of the thesis of figure skating.”

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5 Old-School Cleaning Habits I Still Use Because They Work Better Than New Hacks

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 13:57:49 +0000

For a while, I chased every new cleaning trick. Sprays with special caps. Tools that promised speed. Methods designed to look impressive more than actually work.

What I slowly noticed was that the homes that stayed clean the longest relied on simpler habits. Not louder products. Not stronger formulas. Just methods that removed dirt instead of rearranging it.

These are the old-school cleaning habits I still use because they outperform most modern shortcuts.

Vinegar Comes Before Any “Fresh” Smell

This is always step one.

If a space smells off, no amount of fragrance fixes it. Vinegar clears the problem at the source. I use it diluted on hard surfaces, inside appliances, and occasionally leave a small bowl in rooms with lingering odors.

Once it dries, the smell disappears completely. What’s left is neutral air, not layered scent.

I never add aroma until this step is done.

Baking Soda for What Liquids Can’t Fix

Liquids clean surfaces. Baking soda handles what’s trapped.

Carpets, trash areas, fridge shelves, and closets all hold smells that wipes can’t reach. Baking soda absorbs them without adding scent or residue.

I use it dry before vacuuming or keep it in open containers tucked out of sight. It works quietly, which is exactly why it’s effective.

Heat and Steam Before Scrubbing

Old cleaning routines relied on heat for a reason.

Steam loosens grease, food splatter, and buildup before any effort is applied. Whether it’s a pot of hot water, a steamed microwave, or a hot shower run before bathroom cleaning, heat reduces friction.

Scrubbing becomes wiping. Wiping becomes finishing.

This step saves time more than any tool.

Sunlight Instead of More Product

Fresh air and sun still do something no spray can replicate.

When fabrics start to feel stale, I don’t reach for scent boosters. I reach for light and airflow. Towels, rugs, and even pillows improve noticeably after time in the sun.

The result isn’t “clean-smelling.” It’s just clean.

Cloth Rags Over Disposable Fixes

Paper towels spread mess as often as they remove it.

Reusable cloths hold dirt, absorb moisture, and clean in fewer passes. I keep different cloths for different tasks and wash them regularly.

It’s not about nostalgia. It’s about control.

Why These Habits Still Work

Old cleaning methods focused on removal, not masking. Air first. Surfaces second. Scent last, if needed at all.

Once I returned to that order, cleaning became faster and the results lasted longer. New tools can help, but the foundation hasn’t changed.

Most modern hacks work best when these basics are already in place.

The post 5 Old-School Cleaning Habits I Still Use Because They Work Better Than New Hacks appeared first on Homedit.

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The Sculptural Sofa Shift: 2026 Living Rooms Are Breaking Up With the Boxy Sectional

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 12:41:23 +0000

The era of the wall-hugging sectional is fading. In 2026, designers are rethinking the sofa as architecture, not filler. Seating now defines circulation, frames conversation, and introduces form that reshapes the room. Curves replace corners. Low profiles replace bulk. Texture replaces safe color palettes.

From modular systems that float at the center of the space to art-driven silhouettes that act as focal points, the sofa has become the structural anchor of the modern living room. This shift is not about abandoning comfort. It is about giving comfort presence.

The “Cloud” Modular Standard

This is the textbook definition of the 2026 modular sofa trend. Gone are the stiff, upright backs; in their place are deep, low-profile seats that invite lounging rather than perching.

The genius here is the separation—each segment is an individual block, allowing the owner to split the “L” shape into separate seating islands for a party. It pairs polished marble elegance with the slouchy comfort of grey linen, striking the perfect balance between “showroom ready” and “Saturday nap.”

The Golden-Age Curve

Rectangles are out; “social curves” are in. This rust-colored velvet beauty rejects the TV-centric layout in favor of face-to-face connection. By curving the seating inward, the sofa creates a natural “conversation pit” without requiring architectural renovation. It is a bold, moody choice that turns the furniture into a self-contained room, perfect for open-plan spaces that need a distinct, intimate anchor.

The Museum-Grade Statement

This isn’t furniture; it is soft sculpture. 2026 is seeing a return to “art-forward” seating, where the sofa acts as the room’s primary visual event. The deep red velvet, accented by gold linear detailing, breaks every rule of the “neutral base” theory. It is a high-risk, high-reward piece that signals a move away from safe greys toward brave, personality-driven design that demands attention.

The Flexible Velvet System

This setup highlights the “mix-and-match” evolution. Instead of a single matching set, the design pairs a textured grey unit with a deep emerald velvet chaise. This speaks to the versatility often seen in a sofa configuration, where storage and style coexist, and different modules can be swapped to refresh the room’s palette. It proves that your sofa sections don’t have to be identical twins—they just have to be cousins.

The Textured Corduroy Return

Texture is the new color. This massive sectional embraces the return of corduroy, adding a tactile, ribbed surface that feels nostalgic yet current. The cream fabric softens the large footprint, while the modular design allows the ottoman to move freely, transforming the “L” shape into a generous daybed. It captures the essence of cozy-core without relying on bold hues.

A configuration like this from Belffin sofa shows how proportion and fabric choice can elevate a neutral palette. The ribbed upholstery brings depth and shadow, giving beige dimension and presence. It proves that comfort and visual impact can exist in the same piece when texture leads the design.

The “Low-Slung” Italian

This design embraces the “grounding” trend. The profile is incredibly low, keeping the sightlines of the room completely open. The tufted cream upholstery adds a layer of “classic luxury” to an otherwise stark, modern silhouette. It is designed for the “sprawling” lifestyle—perfect for long, lazy evenings where the boundary between sitting and lying down completely disappears.

The Kinetic Blue Lounge

This navy blue piece challenges the idea that a sofa must be a static block. With adjustable backrests and a futon-like profile, it is designed for “active lounging.” It sits low to the ground, surrounded by nesting tables, creating a casual, bohemian vibe. It is perfect for a media room or a studio apartment where the furniture needs to multitask as a guest bed or a reading nook.

The Woven Outdoor Hybrid

The line between indoor and outdoor furniture is dissolving. This white sofa features a woven base and back screen that mimics high-end patio furniture but is refined enough for a living room. The “screen” element adds privacy and structure, making it perfect for open-concept lofts where you need to create “rooms” without building walls. It is airy, architectural, and completely unexpected indoors.

The Suede Socialite

Sometimes, simplicity wins. This taupe suede sofa is a masterclass in “understated luxury.” It doesn’t scream for attention, but its deep seat and single-cushion bench design offer a clean, uninterrupted line that feels expensive. Paired with oversized mirrors and greenery, it acts as a quiet, sophisticated backdrop that allows the rest of the decor to shine.

The Architectural Green

Green is the new neutral for 2026. This olive-toned sofa uses a slim, tailored profile to fit into a modern, geometric space. The mix of a solid structure with plush, loose pillows offers the best of both worlds: it looks tidy but feels soft. It pairs perfectly with the hexagonal mirror and industrial lamp, proving that a sofa can be both cozy and architectural.

The Sunshine Noir Contrast

This setup proves that grey doesn’t have to be gloomy. The low-profile, slate-grey sofa acts as a grounding “shadow” element, allowing the twin mustard-yellow armchairs to explode with energy. This is a masterclass in using color to define zones within a room.

The arrangement creates a dynamic “social triangle,” where the furniture pieces face each other to encourage dialogue, supported by a sleek marble table that adds a touch of cool, hard luxury to the soft velvet landscape.

The Curved Conversation Starter

This grey velvet sofa embraces the “soft geometry” trend that is dominating 2026. Its gentle, crescent curve breaks the rigid grid of the room, softening the hard lines of the black coffee table and the structured wooden armchairs.

It’s a piece designed for flow—literally guiding traffic around it while pulling people into its center. The pairing of the plush, unstructured sofa cushions with the architectural, rigid chairs creates a satisfying “hard-soft” balance that feels instantly expensive.

The Compact Studio Hybrid

Not every 2026 living space can handle a massive footprint, and this design answers the call for “lightweight luxury.” With its exposed walnut exoskeleton and button-tufted cushions, it bridges the gap between a sofa and an oversized lounge chair.

It is the antithesis of the heavy, blocky modular sofa, offering a “floating” visual weight that makes small rooms feel expansive. Perfect for a bedroom nook or a studio apartment, it proves that comfort doesn’t always require bulk.

The “Liquid” Velvet Curve

This kidney-bean-shaped sofa represents the peak of the “organic movement.” Its fluid, continuous line eliminates all sharp corners, breaking the rigid grid of a standard room and allowing energy to flow effortlessly around it.

Upholstered in a shimmering, crushed grey velvet, it catches the light differently from every angle, acting more like a piece of “kinetic sculpture” than a place to sit. It’s designed for the homeowner who wants their furniture to dictate the room’s movement rather than just hug the walls.

The “Power Suit” Symmetry

This setup is “corporate chic” aimed at the formalist. It rejects the slouchy, low-profile trend entirely in favor of upright, rigid structure. The textured beige fabric and monogrammed cushions evoke a “fashion house” aesthetic, prioritizing discipline over lounging.

Flanked by monolithic, blocky wooden side tables and matching lamps, it creates a “symmetry sanctuary” that feels less like a family den and more like a high-end hotel lobby, perfect for spaces dedicated to serious conversation.

The post The Sculptural Sofa Shift: 2026 Living Rooms Are Breaking Up With the Boxy Sectional appeared first on Homedit.

Advertising made the internet accessible. Will it do the same for AI?

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 11:42:00 +0000

Advertising in generative AI systems has become a fault line. Last month, OpenAI released that it would start running ads in ChatGPT. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, OpenAI’s chief financial officer defended the introduction of ads inside ChatGPT, arguing that it is a way to “democratize access to artificial intelligence,” and that this decision is aligned with its mission: “AGI for the benefit of humanity, not for the benefit of humanity who can pay.”

Within days, Anthropic fired back in a Super Bowl commercial, ridiculing the idea that ads belong inside systems people trust for advice, therapy, and decision-making. In some way, this is a spat about how each company is marketing itself. In another way, this debate echoes the debates about the early internet, but with far higher stakes.

The big question

The underlying question is not whether advertising generates revenue. It clearly does. But rather: is advertising the only viable way to fund AI at scale. And whether, if adopted, it will quietly dictate what these systems optimize for.

History offers a cautionary answer. The last several decades of online advertising has proven that when profit is decoupled from user value, incentives drift toward harvesting data and maximizing engagement—the variables that can be most easily measured and monetized.

That trade-off shaped everything in the internet economy. As advertising scaled, so did the incentives it created. Attention became a scarce resource. Personal information became currency.

What Google taught us

Google’s founders themselves acknowledged this risk at the dawn of the modern web. In their 1998 Stanford paper, Sergey Brin and Larry Page warned that ad-funded search engines create inherent conflicts of interest, writing that such systems are “biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers,” and that advertising incentives can encourage lower-quality results.

Despite this warning, the system optimized for what could be measured, targeted, and monetized at the expense of privacy, transparency, and long-term trust. These outcomes were not inevitable. They flowed from early design choices about how advertising worked, data moved, and influence was disclosed.

A pivotal moment

Artificial intelligence now finds itself at a similar pivotal moment, but under far greater economic pressure and with far higher stakes. It is worth noting, artificial intelligence is not cheap to run. OpenAI projected that it will burn through $115 billion by 2029. Like internet users, AI users are unwilling to pay for access, and advertising has historically allowed the internet, and businesses depending on it, to scale beyond paying users.

If advertising is going to fund AI, personal data cannot be the fuel that powers it. If conversations on an AI platform leak into targeting data, users will stop trusting it and will start viewing it as a surveillance tool. Furthermore, once personal data becomes currency, the system inevitably optimizes for extraction.

That does not mean future advertisers on these AI platforms would have to operate in the dark. Brands will still need to know that their spending delivers results, and that their messages target users aligned with their values. It’s justifiable that brands need outcome measurement and contextual assurance.

The real problem

The irony in Anthropic’s critique is instructive. A Super Bowl commercial is itself a testament to advertising’s enduring power as a form of communication and cultural signaling. Advertising is not the problem. Invisible incentives are.

The way to satisfy both consumer trust and business growth is to build the advertising ecosystem on open, inspectable systems so that influence can be seen, measured, and governed without requiring the collection or exploitation of personal data. Standards such as the Ad Context Protocol sets out to do exactly this.

This is the window in which profit can still be aligned with value. At stake is the difference between advertising as manipulation and advertising as sustainable and enduring market infrastructure. The ad-funded internet failed users not because it was free, but because its incentives were invisible. AI has the chance to do better. The choice is ours to make.

I Left a Bowl of Baking Soda in the Laundry Room and Didn’t Expect This

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 11:15:48 +0000

The laundry room never smelled bad. That was the reason I ignored it for so long. There was no sharp odor, no mildew punch, no obvious sign of a problem. Still, the air always felt slightly off. Heavy. Like the room was holding onto something it didn’t want to release.

Opening the door helped for a few minutes. Running the dryer made it worse. Sprays added a clean scent without changing the space.

I wasn’t trying to freshen the room. I wanted to see if the air itself could change.

So I placed an open bowl of baking soda on a shelf and left it there.

Why Laundry Rooms Hold Odors Without Smelling Dirty

Laundry rooms collect residue quietly.

Warm air carries moisture. Detergent and softener release volatile compounds. Lint escapes into the room. Clean clothes off-gas as they cool. None of it smells strong enough to notice on its own.

Together, it creates air that feels stale rather than dirty.

Because the space is usually closed off, those compounds have nowhere to go.

What Changed After a Day

The change wasn’t dramatic.

There was no “fresh” smell and no clear moment where something clicked. The room simply felt different. Lighter. Easier to stand in. The low-grade mustiness I hadn’t fully noticed was gone.

That absence was the result.

Why Baking Soda Works in Still Air

Baking soda doesn’t mask odors.

It absorbs acidic and organic odor compounds from the air as they pass over its surface. Because it doesn’t release fragrance or moisture, it works slowly and consistently without changing the room’s smell profile.

Nothing new is added. Something old is removed.

That’s why the effect feels subtle but real.

Why This Worked Better Than Ventilation

Ventilation moves air around.

Baking soda changes what’s in it.

Fans, open doors, and airflow dilute odors temporarily. Once the air settles, the problem returns. Baking soda keeps working in the background, even when the room is closed.

Why I Chose Baking Soda Instead of Vinegar

Vinegar would have worked here too, but for a different reason. It’s effective when there’s residue to break down or buildup to dissolve. The laundry room didn’t need that. It wasn’t holding onto grime. It was holding onto air that had nowhere to go. Baking soda made more sense in a dry, closed space where the issue wasn’t what was stuck to surfaces, but what was suspended between them.

The Part I Didn’t Expect

I expected the room to smell cleaner. Instead, it stopped feeling used. That’s a difference I would have noticed years ago if I had tried this sooner.

Sometimes the fix isn’t a product. It’s giving the air a place to put what it’s carrying.

The post I Left a Bowl of Baking Soda in the Laundry Room and Didn’t Expect This appeared first on Homedit.

San Jose just made its buses 20% faster

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 11:00:00 +0000

Public transit could be on the verge of getting a whole lot more efficient.

The Bay Area city of San Jose says it has improved public transportation by implementing an AI transit signal priority (TSP) system that makes its bus routes 20% faster and shortens ride times for passengers. An urban planning win, it also broadens the strategies available to other cities looking to improve their public transport.

TSP systems are programs that make traffic lights responsive and adaptable to public transportation in real time. They can extend a green light to give buses an extra second to make it through an intersection or shorten a red light so they don’t have to wait as long. It’s similar to the higher-urgency emergency vehicle preemption (EVP) system for first responders.

While EVP systems for ambulances, fire engines, and police cars can immediately change signals, TSP systems for buses or trains can only nudge them. The extra moments from those lower-priority nudges, though, can still make a meaningful difference in keeping buses operating on schedule.

“By helping buses move more efficiently through intersections, the technology reduces delays, improves on-time performance, and shortens wait times for riders,” a statement from the city read.

Cities have found other ways to reduce wait times for riders. AI lane enforcement that tickets vehicles driving in or blocking the bus lane cuts the number of illegally parked cars in a hurry. In London, buses have switched to contactless boarding, which led to improved boarding times.

A passenger boards a Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority bus. [Photo: VTA]

San Jose becomes one of several test cities

San Jose’s TSP was developed by Lyt, a Northern California transit software company. Its software interacts with a transit agency’s traffic manager center via a computer called Maestro.

Lyt’s system was piloted in San Jose beginning on just two Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) bus routes in 2023; now it’s used for 24 routes. Federal and state funds paid for a majority of the project.

Lyt provided TSP software for buses in Portland, Oregon, in 2022 that reduced delays by 69%. Last September the company announced it would pilot its tech on four bus routes in Baltimore. Lyt did not respond to a request for comment.

Lyt’s TSP technology uses criteria like routing information, traffic conditions, and vehicle location to predictively keep buses running on time. The company pitches its system as better and more cost effective than the analog prioritization method of dash-mounted strobes on buses that beam infrared or optical lights to traffic pole equipment.

“Our cloud-based transit priority system takes the global picture of a route into account and uses machine learning to predict the optimal time to grant the green light to transit vehicles at just the right time,” Lyt founder and CEO Tim Menard said in a statement about the system when it expanded across more San Jose routes in 2023.

Public transit garners new public interest

City bus speeds have grown from being strictly transportation and infrastructure issues to something that resonates more broadly after New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani won last year’s election in part on a campaign promise to make city buses faster and free to ride.

It’s a promise Mamdani’s office says he intends to keep, even after the federal Department of Transportation developed a proposal to stop its transit funding for any city that provides free bus service, according to Politico—which represents a direct threat to the Mayor’s ambitious plans.

Nevertheless, smarter systems that give buses a few extra seconds to make it through an intersection could be the edge that makes public transportation in cities across the country faster and more reliable.

Anthony Edwards has a plan to get your attention

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 11:00:00 +0000

When Minnesota Timberwolves star Anthony Edwards steps onto the NBA All-Star court in Los Angeles with the league’s best players, there will be cameras following his every move.

But it won’t just be NBC clocking the action. Edwards’s own Three-Fifths Media will be there for his ongoing unscripted show, Year Six. It’s the second season chronicling the daily grind of his NBA exploits, building on last year’s Year Five.

Three-Fifths Media started in 2019, with Justin Holland, Edwards’s business partner and manager. They signed a production deal with Wheelhouse in 2024 to collaborate on projects like Year Six. So far, Three-Fifths has produced Serious Business, an unscripted show on Prime Video that challenges celebrities and athletes in their own domains, Year Five, and now Year Six, and the inaugural Believe That Awards, which aired in October on YouTube and had 167 million views across platforms in its first 48 hours. On the side, Edwards also produced a hip-hop album featuring heavyweights Pusha T, Quavo, and Wale.

The 24-year-old Edwards is methodically building his own content and entertainment business clearly influenced by the success some of his on-court heroes have had over the past decade, like Kevin Durant with Boardroom and LeBron James with Fulwell Entertainment (formerly the SpringHill Co.). Of course, there is no guaranteed blueprint—witness SpringHill’s financial struggles, despite strong productions, that led to its merger with Fulwell last year.

The level of realism is so high that Kaiyuan Securities believes the new model is positioned to be “widely adopted first in AI manga and short drama areas, bringing down costs and improving efficiency to benefit companies with large holdings of intellectual property or traffic.”

The markets agreed. The release of these models immediately sent shockwaves through the Chinese tech sector. Digital content company house COL Group skyrocketed in the anticipation it will use these models. Shares in studio giant Huace Media and game developer Perfect World rallied 7% and 10% respectively. Investors aren’t betting on a toy; they’re betting on the total replacement of traditional production pipelines in gaming, film, and publishing.

An industrial revolution for the visual arts

For many professionals in the trenches, generative AI tools are not toys; they are the new standard. Julian Muller, an award-winning director and creative producer, told me the shift is already visible to everyone. “Just from what I saw in the Super Bowl commercials on Sunday, many incorporated AI elements to achieve creative results. We are definitely at the beginning of a shift in what is possible under tighter timelines and leaner production investments,” Muller says.

“I’d say these models [Seedance 2.0 and Kling 3.0] clearly can produce stunning visual results,” Muller tells me, noting, however, that they’re not perfect. “They are very close to being indistinguishable from real production footage, yet I think there is still a detectable artificial quality to it.”

Muller does believe that we have passed the point of no return. “Directors and producers who don’t use AI tools to enhance their projects will soon become the exception and not the rule,” he says. “This is te future, and we’re definitely not going back.”

This sentiment is echoed by Tim Simmons, a 17-year Hollywood veteran who analyzes the industry on YouTube’s channel Theoretically Media. He told me that while big studios are paralyzed by their own infrastructure, indie creators are adapting.

“Adoption at the large studios will remain slower because of the rigid postproduction specs that necessitate building customized AI workflows,” he says. “The challenge is the time required to build such a workflow versus the speed at which AI models are evolving.” Basically, by the time the studios have finished constructing your bridge, the river has moved 150 miles to the north, he points out.

“Setting aside the complex discussions regarding unions and talent for a moment, it’s safe to say that through 2026, you’ll see tentative steps from larger studios,” Simmons says. “But for indie studios and international production houses working outside the traditional Hollywood system? Utilization will rise rapidly.”

A demo video from the Kling 3.0 announcement [Image: Kuaishou]

No soul in the machine

Not everyone is ready to embrace the algorithm, of course. While the technology has nearly conquered the visual uncanny valley, a deeper, emotional chasm remains. “I don’t think we’ve ever been amazed and saddened like we are today,” Peter Quinn, a VFX artist and director known for his surreal, handcrafted effects, told me via email. “Spectacular ‘art’ has just become so dull,” he says.

Quinn argues that we value art not just for the final image, but for the human struggle behind it—the painter mixing colors, the stop-motion artist moving a puppet millimeter by millimeter. “Kling 3.0 and Seedance 2.0, while spectacular, are 2026’s latest shiny AI toys . . . capable of generating soulless marvels, birthed in a data center somewhere,” he says. “It’s interesting how the ‘wow’ fades when we hear it’s AI.”

In fact, Quinn is in the process of creating a TV docuseries about the anti-AI. Titled The Creators, it intentionally features dozens of “real” artists who’ve found interesting ways to express creativity by leaning heavily into showing the process, time, and effort it takes to make something.

“We see a painter mixing and painstakingly applying paint to a canvas over days, stop-motion artist’s timelapse of weeks of tiny well-considered adjustments, a dancer getting it wrong, a collage artist cutting hundreds of pieces by hand, an artist who can create photo-real pencil sketches, a sculptor who knows the nuance of clay, or a photographer who sees something nobody else does,” he tells me. “It just feels like it’s time. [The] time it takes is what makes it valuable and worthy of looking at or hanging on a wall.”

Titans of the industry share his skepticism. Guillermo del Toro has famously dismissed AI art as “an insult to life itself,” while Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul creator Vince Gilligan says he won’t use tools that remove the human element from storytelling. In Pluribus’s credits there is a line that says that humans proudly made it. Maybe TV and cinema will bifurcate between a minority of human-only-made art for the galleries and the purists, and algorithmic content for the masses. Just like there are fanatics of real film, like Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino, who refuse using digital cameras like everyone else in the industry.

A demo video from the Kling 3.0 announcement [Image: Kuaishou]

The new impressionism

I understand Quinn, Del Toro, Nolan, and every purist out there. But, from a historical perspective, it really doesn’t make a lot of sense. Despite the existential angst—and leaving aside the huge problem that this will cause in terms of jobs and copyright issues, a topic for another article—there is reason for deep optimism.

We are standing at a moment in history that mirrors the state of art in the late 19th century. Before the industrial revolution brought us the collapsible paint tube and pre-stretched factory-made canvas, painting was an expensive, studio-bound endeavor reserved for the elite who had the patrons that would pay them enough for them to grind their own pigments. The industrial revolution in paint manufacturing liberated every artist. It allowed Monet and Renoir to leave the studio, go outside, and paint the light. It birthed Impressionism.

Seedance 2.0 and Kling 3.0 may be the paint tubes of cinema and TV, which has seen its cost go down with the analog and video revolutions, but it’s still reserved for a very few. Those models—and the ones that will come next from Google and others—truly open the gates for true AI-generated stories that will feel as real as the ones produced with real people, whether the purists like it or not.

Simmons believes “there is a ‘new media’ coming that isn’t ‘just movies but cheaper.’” It will be interactive, generative, and personalized in ways we can’t fully articulate yet, he says. “I don’t think we have the language for it yet. Right now, we are looking at the internet in 1990 and asking, ‘How will this change the fax machine?’ The answer wasn’t a better fax machine.”

I believe that he is right. By lowering the barrier to entry to zero, Seedance and Kling are inviting billions of people who have never held a camera to tell their stories. With the uncanny valley closed, the gatekeepers are gone. The only thing left is to see what humanity decides to paint with this terrifying, wonderful new brush.

Core77 Design Awards 2026: Montana Cherney on Design's Ripple Effects

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 18:20:58 +0000

Through her work across four continents, Montana Cherney has learned how design can support meaningful and lasting change. Not just through the solutions it creates, but through the capabilities it builds in others. As Innovation Coach at the International Baccalaureate, and through her work advancing innovation in education, healthcare, financial services, government, and public services, she's learned that the most lasting impact often comes from what happens after the designer leaves the room.

"What excites me most is building teams' capabilities in design and innovation, both mindset and skillset, and celebrating the moments when those capabilities become visible, shared, and passed on," Montana says. Her work has ranged from digitally-enabled financial savings products for smallholder farmers to brand and service delivery strategies for HIV prevention, co-designed with girls and women in Sub-Saharan Africa—all built through partnerships with communities, system stakeholders, innovators, governments, and policymakers.

The moments that matter most to Montana reveal themselves in unexpected ways. "Some of the most meaningful moments in my work come from seeing the ripple effects of coaching," she explains. "When colleagues in multi-governmental organizations describe feeling supported enough to openly share challenges and ideas, or when senior officials in a Ministry of Health, newly introduced to human-centered design, confidently lead co-creation workshops and articulate the value of an HCD approach for women's health in their own words."

Beyond Optimism

Asked about her concerns for the design field, Montana reframes the question itself. "At the moment, I am less worried about the world of design and more worried about the world itself," she says. "Designers have long been optimistic and adaptive, and the question I continue to grapple with is how the field can remain resilient, navigating uncertainty with agility and creativity, not only to produce new solutions, but also to model new ways of working and collaborating that contribute meaningfully to broader societal challenges."

It's a perspective that acknowledges design's role extends beyond deliverables to the processes and relationships that shape how change happens.

Shifting Roles

As jury captain for the Design for Social Impact category in the 2026 Core77 Design Awards, Montana brings this understanding of design's evolving position in systems change. Her advice to entrants reflects a fundamental shift in how designers might understand their work.

"For the Design for Social Impact category specifically, I would encourage entrants to reflect on the role they play as designers," Montana says. "When designing for social impact, the designer's role often shifts, from being the primary problem-solver to serving as a coach, convener, and coordinator, applying creative approaches to support others in shaping solutions throughout the entire journey, from discovery to delivery."

It's an invitation to think beyond the artifact and toward the ecosystem—to show not just what was designed, but how the design process itself enabled others to create lasting change.

2025 Winner

The 2025 Professional winner in the Design for Social Impact was The Lotus Ring from Julia Lemle at Lotus. With this ring you can control anything—lights, fans, appliances, even TVs. With this product you can convert any space into an accessible space in seconds—and you can take it with you wherever you go.

If you have a forward-thinking idea that could spark a fire with our jurors, share it with us through the 2026 Core77 Design Awards . Enter the C77DA before February 27 to lock in regular pricing.

An Attractive, Functional Furniture Piece for Humans and Cats

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 18:20:58 +0000

As we saw here, if your cat damages your sofa, you can perform a kintsugi-style repair with embroidery.

However, if you'd prefer to avoid the problem altogether, you could draw your cat away from the sofa with a scratching post. To prevent living room eyesores, cat furniture company Mau offers this Kona Scratcher, a bent plywood sidetable that conceals a scratching surface:

The scratching surface is just corrugated cardboard. The company sells refills for a whopping $60 per pair, but you could probably make your own with an Amazon box and a Sunday afternoon.

The table runs $400.

A Smart Production Hack for Welding a Pegged Grid

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 18:20:58 +0000

German company Schweisstisch24 sells this D28 Tool Trolley, which targets their industrial welding clients. The beefy trolley, designed to hold clamps, squares and tools, has a load capacity of 240kg (529 lbs).

Because the company knows a thing or two about welding, they've come up with a production trick to cut the manufacturing time of these trolleys. Before welding the tubular pegs to the steel plate, they first run those parts through a laser cutter:

"This makes our production process significantly faster," they explain, "as nothing needs to be aligned before welding."

No measuring, no squaring parts up, no clamping in place. Smart.

Nendo Founder Oki Sato's Comic Strip is Hilarious

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 18:20:57 +0000

A few months ago Oki Sato, founder of Nendo, started a comic strip (of sorts, on Instagram; you need to cli). While some of it is product-design-related content…

…some are just funny product observations…

…while others are just weirdly relatable stories about objects:

Plenty more to see here.

Super Bowl ratings revealed: How the game and Bad Bunny’s halftime show stacked up against last year

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 14:07:32 +0000

Sunday night’s Super Bowl and Bad Bunny fell short of setting records for most watched U.S. broadcast and halftime show.

Seattle’s 29-13 victory over New England averaged 124.9 million viewers on NBC, Peacock, Telemundo, NBC Sports Digital, and NFL+, according to Nielsen’s Big Data + Panel rating system.

That fell short of the 127.7 million U.S. viewers that tuned in for Philadelphia’s 40-22 victory over Kansas City last year on Fox.

However, Super Bowl 60 is the most-watched program in NBC history. The network is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year.

Bad Bunny’s halftime show averaged 128.2 million viewers from 8:15-8:30 p.m. Eastern. That would make it the fourth-most watched halftime behind Kendrick Lamar (133.5 million, 2025), Michael Jackson (133.4 million, 1993) and Usher (129.3 million, 2024).

Peak audience sets U.S. record

The audience for the game peaked at 137.8 million viewers during the second quarter (7:45-8 p.m. Eastern), which is a record. That surpassed the previous mark of 137.7 million during the second quarter of last year’s Super Bowl.

This year’s audience ended a streak where the last four Super Bowls had experienced audience increases. It is the fifth straight year the game has averaged over 100 million viewers.

After three straight years of Super Bowls that came down to the final minute, the last two have lacked excitement.

Sunday’s game was the second in Super Bowl history in which a touchdown had not been scored in the first three quarters. Seattle was up 12-0 going into the final 15 minutes.

Last year’s game was decided in the first half as Philadelphia built a 24-0 lead en route to a 40-22 victory.

Bad Bunny versus Kid Rock

The Turning Point USA halftime show featuring Kid Rock peaked at 5 million at one point on YouTube.

Nielsen did not measure any of the YouTube live stream viewership. Of the linear networks that carried it, the only one Nielsen measures is broadcast network Charge! Full Nielsen ratings for the prior week will be released on Wednesday.

According to YouTube figures though, there have been 21,208,583 views of the alternate halftime show through Tuesday night, according to the conservative organization’s page. Bad Bunny’s show has already had 61,311,972 views.

Total social media consumption of Bad Bunny’s halftime show set a record of 4 billion views after the first 24 hours, according to the NFL and Ripple Analytics. That is a 137% increase over last year.

The social media figures include fans, owned platforms, broadcast partners and influencers.

The NFL said over 55% of all social views came from international markets.

Full global viewership for the halftime show is expected to be available early next week.

Spanish audience record

Telemundo averaged 3.3 million viewers, making it the most-watched Super Bowl Spanish-language broadcast in the United States. The Super Bowl has been televised in Spanish in the U.S. since 2014.

The audience peaked during the halftime show, averaging 4.8 million viewers—also making it the most-watched Super Bowl halftime in Spanish-language history.

Olympics benefit from Super Bowl

NBC’s “Primetime in Milan” Olympic show, which featured the women’s downhill and team figure skating events, averaged 42 million viewers, the network’s largest Winter Olympics audience since Day 2 of the 2014 Sochi Games.

It also was a 73% increase from the Olympics show after Super Bowl 56 (24.3 million).

“The Super Bowl and the NFL once again delivered a blockbuster audience across the NBC broadcast network, Peacock, and Telemundo, and provided an unprecedented lead-in to our Primetime in Milan coverage,” NBC Sports President Rick Cordella said in a statement. “The Super Bowl and the Olympics are the two most powerful events in the world, and we salute our talented production, tech, and announce teams who delivered best-in-class presentations for our viewers, stations and partners.”

Other NFL figures

The NFL playoffs averaged 37 million viewers the first three weekends, up 5% from last year and the second-most watched in the last 10 years.

That followed a regular season that averaged 18.7 million, the second-highest since audience averages began being kept in 1988. It was a 10% increase from last season.

AP NFL: https://apnews.com/hub/nfl

—Joe Reedy, AP Sports Writer

Seattle just built the world’s first light rail on a floating bridge

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 12:00:00 +0000

If you live in Seattle and work at Amazon or Meta in nearby Bellevue, you probably drive to work. But by the end of next month there will be another option for commuters: the world’s first light rail line running on a floating bridge.

Right now, drivers cross Lake Washington—the long lake between Seattle and eastern suburbs like Bellevue—use one of three floating bridges. Conventional bridges aren’t feasible because of the depth and width of the lake, which is why the bridges were originally built with pontoons instead. Adding a rail line to one of them meant that designers needed to innovate in multiple ways.

A 4-car train crosses the I-90 floating bridge during the day on December 18, 2025. [Photo: Sound Transit]

First, since the bridge doesn’t have columns like a typical bridge, it moves. “It’s like a ship that’s been anchored to the floor of the lake,” says Brian Holloway, deputy director of engineering oversight at Sound Transit, the local transit agency. Near each end of the bridge, where the floating section connects to fixed parts of the bridge over land, hinge-like expansion joints let the bridge move as the water level changes or wind and waves slightly shift the structure.

Driving over the bridge in a car, you don’t notice the changes as the expansion joints move. But “those geometric changes would have a very significant effect on rail,” says Matthew Barber, a supervising engineer working on the project at WSP. To make light rail feasible, engineers designed a new solution: “track bridges” that support a section of rail on a structure with bearings that let the bridge move freely while keeping the rail steady. “The rail bends in a very smooth way,” Barber says.

Workers prepare forms and pour concrete for the light rail track plinths on the I-90 floating bridge for the 2 Line Link connection to Seattle on September 4, 2024. [Photo: Sound Transit]

The bearings are normally used in seismic retrofits in buildings. “Almost all the pieces on the floating bridge are not unique,” says Holloway. “They’re just being assembled in a different way.”

Weight was another challenge, since the pontoons that float the bridge weren’t designed to hold light rail. To help with that, the design uses thousands of ultra-lightweight concrete blocks to support the rail, using a mix developed and tested in a partnership with the University of Washington. The rail itself is a little shorter and lighter than typical rail to save more weight. When the rail was installed—replacing a former carpool lane—the team also removed a heavy concrete barrier at the edge of the former lane. All of this meant that the bridge could handle the extra weight.

An unpowered LRV is pushed and then towed across the Homer M. Hadley Memorial Bridge (I-90). [Photo: Sound Transit]

On a normal bridge, installing rail would normally involve drilling, but the team didn’t want to risk drilling into the pontoons, which have to stay watertight. Instead, they used a special high-strength adhesive to attach the concrete blocks to the bridge. Since the bridge hadn’t originally been designed to carry electric light rail, engineers had to also find a way to protect it from stray current that could potentially damage the structure. The design now has multiple redundant solutions to avoid that risk.

The setting is unusual, since floating bridges are only used in specific conditions. (Norway’s fjords, for example, could potentially also use floating bridges.) But it’s possible that the design solutions could eventually be replicated in some other areas, including another bridge across Lake Washington in Seattle.

The Mercer Island 2 Line Station on October 22, 2024. [Photo: Sound Transit]

Even beyond the floating bridge, the new seven-mile stretch of light rail—from downtown Seattle to the southern end of Bellevue—required several creative new solutions. That included finding a new way to strengthen an overpass for earthquake safety, and reusing part of a former bridge to create access to a new train station in one neighborhood. “Every inch of the seven miles has examples of never-been-done-before, creative, resourceful designs,” Barber says. (All of this should go unnoticed by users, like any good civil engineering.)

On a recent test ride, he says that going over the bridge “was some of the smoothest track I’ve ever experienced,” as a daily commuter on light rail. The test ride was at night, so there wasn’t much traffic on the neighboring highway.

A dead car pull on the East Link Extension between Bellevue and Mercer Island across the East Channel Bridge on October 29, 2024. [Photo: Sound Transit]

But he imagined it at rush hour. Tens of thousands of people are expected to ride the train daily, eliminating an estimated 230,000 vehicle miles traveled per day. “It was cool to be cruising along next to the cars,” he says. “And I can anticipate that when this opens, there will be lots of commuters on the train who will be zooming past folks who are stuck in traffic in a very satisfied way.”

Anti-ICE protest art is popping up at the Olympics

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Last week, a new piece of public art appeared outside of the Italian National Olympic Committee (CONI) headquarters, located in Rome’s Piazza Lauro de Bosis. The graffiti centers an image of an Olympic ski jumper sailing through the air, while, from below, an ICE agent in a tactical vest points a gun directly at the jumper’s heart. Above the scene, the Olympic Rings are featured, with a twist: the red ring has been reimagined as the bleeding crosshairs of a deadly weapon.

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The art was created by Laika, a self-described activist and graffiti artist based in Rome. In an interview with the publication ANSA English, she explained that the art was an act of protest in the wake of an announcement from U.S. officials that Immigrations and Custom Enforcement (ICE) officers would be part of the American security detail at the Olympics. The announcement came just weeks after ICE agents shot and killed Minneapolis residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti amidst ongoing protests in that city.

Reports that ICE agents would appear at the Olympics surfaced in late January, and were met with confusion, outrage, and wide-spread protests from Italian citizens. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security clarified in a statement to the AP on January 26 that the agents in question would not be part of ICE’s immigration enforcement operations, but rather from its Homeland Security Investigations branch, which frequently travels overseas to events like the Olympics to assist with security. Still, Italian citizens and Olympic attendees are continuing to speak out against ICE in solidarity with both the people of Minnesota and Americans at large.

Laika is one of many Italian citizens who have taken to using artwork as a form of protest against ICE’s presence at the Olympics. Here are three examples of the most powerful work so far.

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“No ICE in Milano”

On January 31, hundreds of protestors gathered in Milan’s Piazza XXV Aprile (a central square) to voice their dissent against ICE. In the crowd, dozens of people held aloft the same sign: an image of the Olympic Rings, reimagined as colorful handcuffs, captioned with the phrase, “No ICE in Milano.”

The signs appear to have been designed and distributed by the group I Sentenilli di Milano, an organization dedicated to supporting the queer community and advocating against fascism.

“The disturbing images coming from the United States add to the horror of other places in the world where human rights have been trampled on,” the organizers wrote in a caption on Instagram, adding, “That’s why the Sentinelli with many other democratic realities are waiting for you in the square on Saturday. Come with a whistle.”

At the protest, another organizer named Alessandro Capella, head of the Italian Democratic Party’s Milan chapter, told NPR, “It’s not just for the Olympic games, it’s about justice in the world. We don’t want ICE here.”